RealVNC Start Charging for Use

[pxr5]

I've been a RealVNC user for years, it's how I access and use my RPIs both on my LAN and remotely. I received an email today from them telling me that they are scrapping the free home plan (17 Jun 24) and offering various subscription services. Of course, being a tight git, I started looking for alternatives and while there are ways to have local LAN access, remotely is a rather more complex and complicated matter. Bums.

So I googled the text of the email and found this https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/realvnc-is-dropping-its-home-plan-and-barely-noting-its-free-lite-option/?comments=1&comments-page=1 . So buried away and barely noticeable is a lite (free) plan. It requires creating the new plan and therefore having to add the RPIs to the new 'Team' through the licensing on each VNC Server running on the RPIs. Anyway all is good and I'm back running (free) again. I know these companies have every right to charge for their services and I probably would have paid the subscription eventually - but it was a bit sneaky not mentioning the lite version.

:EDIT: I've just been reading the comments on the post above. They are flying in thick and fast  lol

[Fishy]

I've been trying to get vnc onto my new Ubuntu vm boxes.. I think I'm just stupid cos i can never get it to work.. it's either service not running or blank screens or black screens.. windows rdp is just so much easier...

[Slim]

I haven't used VNC for a long time, I only ever used it to access Windows systems at work. As a desktop VNC client I used Remmina, worked well enough.

For my own Linux VMs I only use command line (SSH) now but when I did need a GUI environment I used virt-viewer, which is the built-in remote desktop solution for KVM VMs.

There was a really good Linux remote desktop solution that I used to use to login to my home Linux desktop from work in the noughties called NoMachine, https://www.nomachine.com/

Haven't tried it for years but it was really quick and responsive.

[Fishy]

Yeah I read about nomachine.. anyway tried it.. working.. beautiful.. thanks Slim

[Fishy]

Built a Linux mint VM box  and setup my subsonic music on that with nomachine and ssh to the cli.....wonderful...